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Companies today are dealing with an inevitable dark cloud over their heads – attrition. From the great resignation to quiet quitting, trends over the last couple of years have dictated the shift in the way companies are now looking at employee retention. Organizations are understanding the roles their leaders play in retaining or attracting talent. However, attrition continues to be a huge business metric for companies because it comes with a huge cost. Replacing talent can be very expensive and also lead to a significant productivity drain.

A few weeks ago, we’d broadly discussed how to navigate the talent war in our podcast. This week, we’ll dive a bit deeper into what companies can do to curb attrition significantly.

At Fundamento, we’ve been working with employers to understand critical power skills that drain and drive their customer-facing teams with regards to specific business metrics. When it comes to attrition, irrespective of whether customer-facing or not, our team of IO psychologists and experts have identified that leadership plays a huge role. After understanding our data and analyzing this further, we’ve narrowed down the power skills that organizations must develop in their leaders and teams in order to improve employee experience, enhance productivity and dramatically curb attrition.

Furthermore, we’ve broken down these skills into micro behaviors that reflect manifestations of each skill in day to day work life. Organizations must constantly attempt to answer certain questions in order to genuinely solve for attrition.  

Does your company have solid leaders?

While there are several aspects of a leader that are critical to business success within an organization, it is important that the leader is also one who is able to inspire and motivate their team to do better. This ends up being one of the biggest gaps when it comes to employee satisfaction. Investing in the development of leaders then becomes a priority for organizations dealing with high attrition. Therefore, the power skill associated with this is Inspirational Leadership.

Inspirational Leadership refers to one’s ability to inspire, influence, and lead by example. This involves creating a shared vision and articulating a mission towards achieving common goals.

This power skill allows leaders to become role models for their team members wherein the team follows their footsteps to deliver high quality work.

• Lending ownership: Leaders are able to provide autonomy to team members while allowing them the flexibility to build new capabilities
• Leading by example: Leaders are continuously a positive influence on the team and motivate the team towards ideal behavior by delivering best practices themselves
• Identifying talent: Leaders are able to unlock latent potential of the team by understanding their strengths and challenging them on a regular basis
• Setting goals: Leaders enable goal-setting exercises for the team and inspire them to have ambitious goals so that they can step out of their comfort zone

Do your leaders communicate openly?

A lot of discontentment in the team comes from the fact that there’s limited or selective top-down communication. More often than not, teams feel disengaged or disconnected due to low transparency and trickling information delivery. At every level of leadership, clear and open communication goes a long way in instilling a sense of trust within the team. It is considered a significant driver in curbing attrition. The power skill that organizations need to develop in their leaders is: Transparency.

‍Transparency refers to the ability to maintain honesty, openness, and integrity about emotions, beliefs and ethical principles.

This power skill allows leaders to build trust within the team which enables team-bonding, better collaboration and higher productivity.

• Setting benchmarks: Leaders are able to establish realistic performance expectations by issuing a clear sense of direction for the team so that there’s no scope for confusion or misunderstanding
• Creating communication channels: Leaders are equipped to establish better modes of communication that ensure timely exchange of information
• Enabling team bonding: Leaders are able to activate practices that keep the team together with minimum conflict
• Giving feedback: Leaders do not hold back feedback, deliver it effectively, regularly and work actively with the team towards goal achievement

Does everyone on your team contribute to peer growth?

Leaders set the ball rolling when it comes to peer-to-peer learning. If a leader invests in the growth of their team, the team invests in each other’s growth. Lifting each other up is step one to enhanced productivity because it taps into the strengths of each individual. For this, we’ve identified two power skills that once developed ensure the entire team contributes actively to peer growth: Empathy and Developing Others.

‍Empathy is the emotional ability to understand, share and anticipate the feelings of another.

This power skill allows leaders to make the team feel heard and invested in. This correspondingly creates room for an approachable and open culture within the team.

• Taking time out for the team: Leaders are able to make the team feel heard and their contribution valued
• Offering support: Leaders show genuine interest in their team member’s life and challenges they’re facing
• Being approachable: Leaders are easy to speak to and always available for discussions to ensure their team is on the same page

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Developing Others is the ability to determine strengths and areas requiring improvement in others and mentoring or coaching them towards enhancing their abilities.

This power skills allows leaders to make decisions on the back of their team’s needs and make their growth a priority.

• Developing team strengths: Leaders are able to recognize the development of existing strengths as a priority
• Communicating consistently: Leaders share constructive feedback consistently and tie it to improved business outcomes
• Taking the team’s needs into account: Leaders are accustomed to taking inputs and altering their approach to suit the team’s learning needs for a stronger impact

Does your team focus on solutions over problems?

Conflicts within a team are unavoidable, but how they’re addressed is key. If the leader sets a problem-pointing culture over a solution-finding one, the team’s morale can take a big hit. Therefore, a power skill we believe is crucial to minimizing friction within a team, hence retaining employees is Conflict Resolution.

Conflict Resolution is the process of putting an end to a dispute by utilizing active ways of rectification. It involves finding a solution to a disagreement or opposition.

This power skill ensures that leaders initiate a culture of problem solving within the team and reduce friction to the extent possible so that teams are able to perform better.

• Being unbiased: Leaders are able to focus on events, not personalities
• Knowing problem areas: Leaders are in a position to anticipate possible conflicts and prioritize issues that need immediate attention
• Staying involved yet distanced: Leaders are able to maintain a balanced approach when resolving conflicts and intervene only when necessary

Does your team reflect often?

A metric such as attrition is complex and there are several factors that must be considered while solving for it. However, behavioral skills go a long way in creating a work culture that employees don’t want to leave. The power skills elaborated above manifest in ways that significantly help curb attrition. None of that is easy to maintain though without an extremely critical power skill: Emotional Self Awareness.

Emotional Self Awareness is the ability to identify one’s internal states – feelings, emotions, values or goals and to be conscious of their effect on one’s speech and actions.

This power skill is the one way to ensure that neither the leader nor the team is unaware of their own strengths or weaknesses. This allows then to be open to feedback, not make emotional decisions and understand consequences of their actions.

• Accepting feedback: Team members are able to ask for and accept criticism from others
• Being aware of own tendencies: Team members are able to regulate themselves on an ongoing basis and not make rushed or emotional decisions
• Understanding behavioral impact: Team members are constantly aware of their body language and know how others perceive their actions

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While all of these skills are primarily focused on leaders, it is important to note that leaders precisely set the tone for the way their teams function. If these skills are developed in leaders, the chances of them transferring to the team are manifold. In order to curb attrition, the most effective way is to develop necessary power skills in leaders and see a trickle down effect in the team. When the team collectively feels more productive, individuals are more likely to stay and deliver high quality output.

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Within a span of three months, the company saw a 4% increase in customer Show Rate after implementing Fundamento’s skill-based, data-backed people strategy solution.

The Challenge

A leading health-tech company needed to improve its customer show rates by triggering urgency and shortening sales cycles. They were dealing with a problem that is hugely dominant in service led health-tech companies – the gap between customer intent and buy-in. This meant that while most clients were showing clear intent to buy, not everyone was actually showing up. This impacted business dramatically and delayed sales cycles significantly. One of the main problems that this company was facing was the constant delay in sales cycles. Sales agents in the company were unable to create a sense of urgency in clients to act, which put multiple sales opportunities at risk. Show Rate was the primary metric impacted.

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The company was looking to improve its metric but in a manner that was more sustainable. The idea was for it to not be a one-time solution but one that stuck. Their sales agents were in need of a deliberate strategy that helped them close sales faster and lose minimum high-intent clients.

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As a company focussed on learning and growth, they had not thus far conducted an objective analysis on what the underlying factors for their declining show rate was. With Fundamento, they sought an understanding of what drains and drives their team and what solutions would be the most effective.

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Using Fundamento’s Platform

On understanding the problem the client was facing, Fundamento conducted user conversations to delve into where the problem was and to gauge any potential roadblocks that might present themselves. Through Fundamento’s Skill Finder, we were able to deep-dive into what the main issue was and gain context to organizational needs. However, besides user conversations, Fundamento also acquired relevant business data to build an impactful and targeted training plan that addressed the crux of the problem.

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This data allowed us to dig deeper into where the organization is at currently and where they’d like to be in the future. As a part of this Skill Mapping exercise, we were able to identify a total of six skills from the Fundamento Skills Inventory, all correlated and relevant to the job role.

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Power Skills

Fundamento mapped six skills in total to the needs of the organization. Each of these skills had unique manifestations at work.

• Critical Thinking:

Critical Thinking is the ability to make objective decisions or logical deductions that support one’s views and often solve problems and analyze information.

• Empathy:

Empathy is the emotional ability to understand, share and anticipate the feelings of another.

• Persuasion:

Influence refers to using effective methods of persuasion in order to make a point, achieve consensus, or achieve the desired results.

• Resilience:

Resilience is the intrinsic ability to overcome hardships and to adaptively cope with stress in a way that allows one to bounce back and resume normal cognitive and physical functions.

• Achievement:

Achievement is one’s ability to accomplish challenging goals and take calculated risks. It is the drive to raise the bar with consistency and determination.

• Conflict Resolution:

Conflict Resolution is the process of putting an end to a dispute by utilizing active ways of rectification. It involves finding a solution to a disagreement or opposition.

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Analysis

After conducting a comprehensive Skill Mapping exercise, the natural next step was to gather objective data on these skills from the team. Fundamento conducted an extensive assessment exercise with the sales team of the organization to unlock data on skills and how they play out at different levels. Moreover, the data played a huge role in establishing the impact of these skills on business, including how each skill practically played out at every level and role.

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Each skill manifests differently in different individuals depending on their job role and seniority within the organization. Therefore, data on power skills helped give us perspective on where the problem lay within the company and what kind of interventions were thus suited.

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Impact of Fundamento

Fundamento was given the task to build impactful and targeted training plans. On the back of all the data that we collected, we recommended a training-led solution that focused on real micro behaviors in sales roles, contextualized to the organization’s needs.

• Segment Customers: Profile customers and alter sales pitch instead of having a company-wide blanket policy
• Create Urgency: Deeply understand customer motivations and encourage them to invest
• Show Benefits: See problems and solutions through systems they operate in
• Resolve Objections: Alleviate customer concerns that may deter them from making a favorable decision
• Engage in Follow-Ups: Close sales with follow-ups through scientifically placed reminders and rescheduling options

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Post implementation and within a span of three months, Fundamento was able to demonstrate real impact. The client witnessed a significant improvement in their key business metric. They saw a +4% increase in Show Rate over a span of three months.

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The pandemic spearheaded a lot of organizational changes. More companies began investing in their employees and as we stand towards the end of 2022, we’ve also witnessed a significant surge in L&D budgets. There’s been a deep realization over the past couple of years wherein organizations have started to focus on building teams for the future of work. What might that entail, most ask. It means building teams within an organization that can withstand uncertainty and change. When Josh Bersin recently emphasized upon the importance of “power skills”, the ones needed to manage change and stay unfazed in the face of uncertainty were on the top.

At Fundamento, we’ve spent a lot of time digging into this. With our team of IO psychologists and on the back of the data we’ve been gathering over the last two years, we’ve identified skills and correlations that dramatically enable an organization. We have an inventory of 33 power skills from which two establish a significant correlation that’s critical in building a workforce for the future – Resilience and Change Management.

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Resilience points to the intrinsic ability to overcome hardships and to adaptively cope with stress in a way that allows one to bounce back and resume normal cognitive and physical functions.

Change Management refers to recognizing the need for change and challenging the traditional status quo constructively. It is having the ability to initiate and successfully manage change.

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More often than not, these two power skills are taken for granted across teams. Organizations expect teams to be resilient in change and manage their emotions, but these are tangible skills that need to be developed over time. Today, organizations are investing in upskilling their teams on these skills and a lot of this is done through company-wide initiatives. However, our team of learning designers suggests that these skills manifest very differently across roles and need to be approached uniquely.

Therefore, we dug further into three job roles and how these skills play out in each of those roles – Sales, Customer Experience and Leadership. Furthermore, we understood how these skills work in tandem with each other to enable the organization.

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Sales

Sales is an incredibly high pressure job. In a changing world, with vast uncertainty, the job of a sales professional has become even more challenging. However, it is one of the most critical job roles in an organization and for the future of work, a sales professional must be able to adapt quickly and develop a growth mindset. Therefore, Resilience and Change Management manifest in sales roles through micro behaviors associated with execution. Developing Change Management in fact sets the ground for developing Resilience:

• Acknowledging the need to adjust communication styles for different clients makes room for the ability to find new learnings despite not closing a sale
• Identifying bottlenecks in the sales funnel and altering the approach to eliminate them allows one to move past rejections and overcome client objections
• Streamlining work to accommodate for additional efforts in difficult times helps maintain consistent efforts in target achievement without falling behind

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Customer Experience

The way Resilience plays out in customer experience roles is underestimated. It is observed more often than not to be the CX teams that impact business due to lack of what people might refer to as “tact” but we’d like to call Resilience. The ability to be able to move on after each customer interaction without letting one affect the other is the one skill that makes a customer experience professional ready for any changing situations and uncertainty. Therefore, how Change Management and Resilience correlate in this role is very intriguing as it almost compliments each other rather than impact each other:

• Disbanding the need of working consistently under pressure to bog one down
• Being open to embracing a new dynamic and less resistant to change
• Prioritizing tasks to zero-in on all of one’s concentration
• Having a forward-thinking approach to implementing organizational shifts
• Embracing criticism and looking at it in positive light
• Being always willing to adopt new and improved ways of doing things

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Leadership

Being a leader in a changing world is one of the most difficult things to do. In fact, we have over many blogs in the past, charted out the various shifts in leadership since the pandemic and especially in what we call the new world of work. Leadership plays a crucial role in setting the tone for the organization and its overall strength in the time of change and uncertainty. Resilience and Change Management are both critical skills for this role and usually manifest together:

• Adapting well in the face of significant stress and helping others do the same
• Understanding the need for transition and outlining the vision and plan for achieving it
• Sustaining their energy level under pressure to cope with disruptive changes
• Taking inventory of team’s resources and executing changes in a way that is compatible with the team and the business’ requirement
• Tapping into their strengths to overcome challenges and working through problems
• Ensuring the change sticks and becomes embedded in the company’s culture and practices

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For any organization moving forward, building Resilience and Change Management in teams is of utmost importance. However, it is equally important to understand how these skills manifest in different roles because they entail different micro behaviors associated with the job role. For each of the three roles, the same skills play out very differently. It is important to do everything on the back of data. At Fundamento, we identify Skill Maps based on the job description, conduct surveys and assessments, and contextualize the solution to the organization’s needs.

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Sales is a stressful job, but one that’s equally rewarding. However, more often than not, people crumble under the pressure and struggle to keep up. A lot of this has to do with emotional intelligence. It’s believed that without emotional intelligence there are no sales. For businesses to survive, emotional and social intelligence plays a crucial role. The future of work depends heavily upon building relationships, whether within an organization, with customers, or other stakeholders. This requires a deep level of discipline, restraint and understanding. In fact, it also plays a critical role in driving key business metrics because of the distinct correlation between certain emotional intelligence traits and power skills that are crucial for achieving business outcomes. In a recent exercise conducted by Fundamento, we found a similar correlation that substantiates this fact.

The finding

In a recent assessment conducted with a cohort of 1866 Sales Agents working at a fast-growing startup, we caught a pattern. There was a direct and positive correlation between Emotional Self Control and Result Orientation for Sales Agents.

What does that mean?

The results from the skills assessment taken by these agents revealed that those agents who are able to balance their emotions are more likely to be focused on outcomes and deliver results. This was also supported by solid data.

According to the data, the correlation showed a proportional linear growth of Result Orientation with an increase in Emotional Self Control.

Let’s break this down even further.

According to the data points collected through the assessment, for every 1 point that increased in the Emotional Self Control score, there was a 4-point increase in Result Orientation. Therefore, on average, there was a stronger drive for target achievement in someone who was also disciplined and practiced restraint.

How does this impact business?

While Result Orientation is a power skill that directly impacts business outcomes, Emotional Self Control is the EI trait that actually powers those skills. Without the latter, a Sales Agent is likely to crumble under pressure and not perform. However, with even a slight increase in Emotional Self Control, a Sales Agent is more likely to not only perform well but raise achievability standards and enhance a key business metric — Win Rate.

Read how to improve your Win Rate!

We’ve dug deeper in our previous blogs on how specific power skills directly help improve Win Rate. At the time, we explained how Result Orientation plays an important role in closing a sale and the way the skill manifests in different roles. The data displayed above substantiates that claim to a large extent. However, this time in correlation to an emotional intelligence trait.

First, let’s dive into what Emotional Self Control and Result Orientation mean. This is how we define them at Fundamento.

Emotional Self-Control is the ability to discipline oneself and restrain (with composure) one’s emotional reactions or immediate outbursts.

While dealing with multiple clients in sales, there is bound to be friction at some level. To be able to maintain composure in a situation that is stressful and not allow emotions to dictate your next course of action is one of the strongest skills to becoming a successful sales professional. Hence, it is not a surprise that this emotional intelligence trait holds deep value in achieving sales success.

Moreover, data suggests that Emotional Self Control is not only a good to have in a sales professional, but essentially a must-have. Among the 1866 Sales Agents who gave the same assessment, on average, with even a minor increase in the score share for Emotional Self Control, there was a significant increase in Result Orientation. According to this finding, if one person scored 35% on Emotional Self Control, they scored around 40% on Result Orientation. This figure then proportionally rose wherein at a 38% Emotional Self Control score, the average score on Result Orientation surpassed 50%. This proportionally linear growth validates the need for Emotional Self Control in achieving improved business outcomes.

Result Orientation is the strong drive towards target achievement. It is the ability to purposefully create and accomplish goals while also prioritizing, raising achievability standards, and working within timeframes.

This power skill allows the team to keep their eyes on the end goal i.e. target achievement with laser-sharp focus while ensuring top-quality delivery of work. We’ve broken down the importance of this skill in improving Win Rate earlier and how it facilitates a crucial but rather underrated function in business. Unlike other skills that impact Win Rate in sales, Result Orientation is the one that eventually closes the deal.

Nonetheless, both these skills above play out at work uniquely for different kinds of job roles. However, in the case of Sales Agents, they work in tandem. Therefore, it is pertinent to understand why Emotional Self Control leads to a substantial increase in Result Orientation.

Our data revealed three direct correlations

Correlation 1: Handling Objections

Emotional Self Control: Handling irate and upset clients with patience and tact without reacting in the moment

Result Orientation: Changing clients’ perspectives in favor of the business by making them feel heard

Correlation 2: Achieving Targets

Emotional Self Control: Dealing effectively with personal issues that may potentially disrupt performance

Result Orientation: Being sincere in efforts of achieving daily targets that affect overall productivity

Correlation 3: Overcoming Obstacles

Emotional Self Control: Identifying and avoiding situations that may lead to feeling vulnerable unexpectedly

Result Orientation: Handling obstacles preemptively that may hinder their performance outcomes

At the end of the day, the job of a Sales Agent is to bring in more business. Our findings showed that this rests on more than just developing one skill, rather developing skills that correlate to each other and maximize output. Organizations are fast realizing the importance of power skills in improving business performance. However, it is also crucial to rest on the back of solid data to understand which skills work collectively to enhance performance in an actionable way.

Fundamento’s Skill Finder works with organizations to deeply understand the needs of employers and deep-dive into specific job roles to identify Skill Maps and provide contextualized solutions on the back of accurate data.

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There’s a new buzzword at work — productivity paranoia.

Just when we saw chatter around quiet quitting die down, research popped up around something that Josh Bersin calls an “organizational design problem”. Microsoft recently released its Work Trend Index for 2022, and everyone is talking about a new phenomenon that highlights the increasing misalignment between employers and employees over employee productivity. This is caused by a disconnect between how much people say they are working and how much leaders believe them. The easiest way to understand this is by seeing the data.

Microsoft’s report surveyed and analyzed data from over 20,000 people across 11 countries. It showed that while 87% of employees said that they were being productive at work, only 12% employers actually believed so. Leaders seemed to have very low confidence in their employees when it came to how much time they were spending on work. In conjunction however, working hours and meetings seemed to have increased by 153% over the last year and globally 53% managers said they were burnt out at work.

So, what’s the missing link? On one hand, employees feel burnt out and working hours have gone up, but on the other, employers don’t look at it as translating into “productivity”. Josh Bersin refers to this as “a problem of organization design, accountability, and focus”.

In fact, Microsoft claims in its report that hybrid working has played a huge factor in this shift. What is interesting to note is that the same report refers to a 2022 Glint survey on how having clarity on work priorities is something that most people said they didn’t have. This is important.

The cumulative trend shows that while managers don’t have confidence in employee productivity, there’s an emergent gap between what employees are doing and what the organization wants them to do. Therefore, the management and employees aren’t aligned and end up being unproductive. This is a simple way to pen down a very complex problem within organizations. At Fundamento, we’ve spent some time digging into what drives efficiency within organizations. In this case, we believe that productivity paranoia emerges from a deep need within an organization for critical power skills that help enhance relationships, strengthen trust and deliver tangible results. In order to deep-dive into this, it is crucial to understand that people strategy plays a huge role in driving productivity and is implemented in different ways within every organization.

If organizations are looking at bridging the gap between management and employees, they need to invest in upskilling their teams specifically on power skills that are relevant to building a more efficient internal working system. Based on the different ways in which productivity paranoia manifests, there are power skills we believe that can transform the way an organization achieves its goals.

What are these power skills?

• Transparency
• Inspirational Leadership
• Empathy
• Developing Others

Some of the most prominent problems that have emerged from existing research on productivity paranoia are lack of clarity on work priorities, low authenticity and deep trust deficit. On the basis of these factors, the Fundamento team dug deeper to develop a skills outline for eliminating productivity paranoia.

Strengthen internal communication

More often than not it has been observed that the root of most internal dissonance is lack of clarity and authenticity between the management and employees. If we double click on productivity paranoia, it stems from a sense of distrust between managers and their team members. This distrust can be addressed by two key skills — Transparency and Inspirational Leadership.

Transparency refers to the ability to maintain honesty, openness, and integrity about emotions, beliefs and ethical principles.

Managers have to ensure that they consciously set the benchmark for open conversations. This begins at the most elementary level of communication:

• Conveying company policies with clarity and openness
• Defining work priorities in a detailed manner
• Setting the right expectations when it comes to work
• Setting a standard for communication within the team that everyone follows

Inspirational Leadership refers to one’s ability to inspire, influence, and lead by example. This involves creating a shared vision and articulating a mission towards achieving common goals.

It all starts with leadership. Transparency as a power skill is effective in a leadership role only when the leader is also someone who can actively influence and inspire the team positively. Team members often don’t find their managers approachable and most of the recent research on productivity paranoia highlights the absence of this bridge. There are multiple ways in which this plays out at work:

• Being a positive influence to team members that is exemplary in nature
• Making room for building relationships within the team that go beyond company goal achievement
• Developing a sense of shared purpose within the team by communicating the company’s larger mission effectively

Support and mentorship go a long way

At the end of the day, any team member will not feel connected to their manager unless they feel looked after. Today, most organizations know that in order to increase employee productivity and improve retention, they must invest in the growth of their employees. Most importantly, this investment must come from an understanding of each person’s individual needs. There are two power skills that actively accelerate this process and iron any creases that affect efficiency — Empathy and Developing Others.

Empathy is the emotional ability to understand, share and anticipate the feelings of another.

A pillar on which the concept of productivity paranoia holds ground is that employees believe they’re being very productive and managers fail to differentiate between real productivity and “productivity theater”. To bridge this gap, managers need to genuinely be invested in their teams:

• Taking interest in the team’s well-being
• Doing regular check-ins with the team
• Identifying blockers and eliminating any hurdles
• Managing emotions within the team that might cause friction of any kind

Developing Others is the ability to determine strengths and areas requiring improvement in others and mentoring or coaching them towards enhancing their abilities.

With all the above mentioned power skills, we address the problem of clarity, authenticity and trust. However, this skill particularly aims to address the disconnection that exists between management and employees. It focuses on creating a culture of growth and influence within the organization:

• Encouraging the team to be accountable for their own development
• Setting achievable goals and benchmarks for the team to follow
• Creating an environment of positive feedback and learning
• Facilitating growth in a manner that taps into every individual’s strengths

Earlier it was quiet quitting, today it’s productivity paranoia, tomorrow it could be another trend that perceives work from a different lens. However, at the core of all these buzzwords are power skills that if developed can overcome these hurdles. Organizations are fast realizing the importance of these power skills in designing people strategy, and people strategy that’s designed on the back of data on skills exceptionally contributes to transforming business.

In so many conversations that we have with clients, there’s one business metric they all seem to converge at — win rate! The challenge is not merely on how to improve their win rate, but how to do so consistently.

Achieving or surpassing the target win rate is probably one of the most important and relevant metrics in an organization. It is what every other metric rests upon. So, it’s not surprising that companies invest a lot of time and money in ensuring their teams are well-equipped to meet that target. Nonetheless, they often fall short of the mark because the journey to a consistently improving win rate is complex. There isn’t a simple ‘act fast and implement’ formula for it. There are many factors that influence win rate and to expect leaders to address them all at once is not practical.

We’ve found that while most companies have processes in place and intermediate sales training to tackle some of the more obvious reasons for falling win rates, what teams really need are specific power skills that allow them the behavioral scope for performing their jobs well. Each of these skills correlates to a business problem that directly affects the win rate.

To explain this further, we did a deep-dive into the various aspects of a sales journey to identify the most relevant power skills that an organization must build in their sales team so that they can easily glide towards an improved win-rate. Here are some questions that you need to ask as you take the plunge:

Is your sales team curious and prepared?

More often than not, your sales team is aware of why a prospect could not convert. Therefore, pre-sales is an incredibly layered process that most people do not follow entirely. It requires teams to identify challenges, gaps and threats in their sales journey, gather information about the customer and prepare accordingly. There are two power skills that play an essential role in making this happen: Curiosity, and Planning and Organizing.

Curiosity is defined as the ability to be driven by eagerness, logic and realistic observations to explore and seek out novel information or experiences.

This power skill allows teams to explore information through eagerness and acquire all the necessary information before making a choice. Step one of the sales process relies on this skill as it leads to tangible results.

• Mapping client scope: Teams are able to dig deeper into client requirements. This also includes peeking into clients’ pockets to get a better understanding of their purchasing power and pitching pricing accordingly.
• Staying in the real world: Teams are able to overcome assumptions and biases that come in the way and rely on logical, realistic observations.
• Making informed decisions: Teams are keen to learn what is new in the market and understand potential better by probing before pitching which makes negotiating with the client easier.

Planning and Organizing is the ability to decide in advance what needs to be done and set up a systematic plan of action bound by time, objectives, priorities and resources.

This power skill allows teams to overcome obstacles in sales cycles and lead with a plan for all possible situations. This can include an array of possible scenarios and situations that might arise. For teams to beat the biggest roadblock in their sales cycle, i.e. rejection, they need to be prepared for what’s to come.

• Preparing rebuttals: Teams are able to prepare counters and rebuttals for common client objections by deep-diving into what the client might be looking for.
• Foreseeing potential risks: Teams are able to understand and breakdown factors like competition, seasonal change, etc. to stay ahead of the tide and overcome any obstacle.
• Being self-aware: Teams are able to assess self strengths and weaknesses and make their next move accordingly
• Having a plan, always: Teams are able to act instantly in the case of any escalations or dissonance because they always have a plan ready. They have visualized possible scenarios and are able to alter their approach as per client geography, age, income, or other factors.

Is your team able to understand client needs?

This might seem simpler than it actually is. Understanding client needs requires more than Curiosity. It needs teams to be able to dig much deeper, make clients feel heard and develop a better understanding of how each client thinks. The power skill that comes into play here is an emotional intelligence trait: Empathy. It’s that step-up that most teams skip in their pursuit of a client.

Empathy is the emotional ability to understand, share and anticipate the feelings of another.

This power skill allows teams to make clients feel heard and put themselves in customers’ shoes. In the absence of this skill, teams are often unable to tap into the exact pain points of the customer, thus failing to offer them the best solution. Empathy is oftentimes a game changer as it plays a big role in establishing long-lasting client relationships.

• Understanding client motivations: Teams are able to get to the heart of what motivates a client towards the product and dig deeper into the value it can add to their lives.
• Tapping on emotions: Teams are able to get clients to open up about their specific needs which allows them to see the client’s perspective in order to map out and customize the best pitch.
• Gaining trust of the client: Teams are able to offer uniqueness to each client and reinforce the value they add, thus making them feel special and gaining their trust so that they claim more benefits

Is your team influential?

Every successful sale is made on the back of solid influence. Influencing your customers is usually considered as one of the most important ingredients of sales. However, it is approached in a very fragmented manner. We’ve identified that influence doesn’t work alone but in conjunction with a determination to get the job done. Therefore, the two power skills closely associated with this are: Influencing People and Bias To Action.

Influencing People is the ability to modify and affect a person’s thinking, sentiment, behavior, or general perception toward some object or issue through request, reason, demand or indirect methods.

This power skill is usually the most high priority skill in sales and customer experience teams because it allows teams the ability to expertly guide a buyer towards a favorable decision and change the client’s perception. It usually kicks in at the deciding stage of a sale where the right move can either complete or break the sales cycle.

• Being an advisor: Teams are able to present themselves to clients as advisors and not salespersons because no one is interested in products today, they want solutions.
• Telling a story that matters: Teams are able to build a story and narrative that connects the client’s pain point to a specific feature of the product.
• Responding promptly to requests: Teams are able to timely act on requests and focus on delivery of service that will deeply impact customer perception of the product.
• Focussing on decision makers: Teams are able to identify the decision makers and share customer testimonials with them and pick up on non-verbal cues
• Acting on feedback: Teams are able to show clients that they’re being attended to actively by being open to feedback and taking immediate action on it.

Bias to Action is the ability to be a self-starter, assess a situation or opportunity, take action without waiting for a command from someone else, and proactively overcome barriers while achieving the desired goal.

The culmination of all of the above power skills is this one skill that can help eliminate loopholes in the process to a large extent. This skill allows teams the ability to single-handedly resolve basic problems, and continuously learn and build upon doing this better.

• Giving quick resolutions: Teams are able to resolve problems quicker and go back to clients with solutions sooner rather than later.
• Reducing any dependencies: Teams are able to not be dependent on managers, thus saving their time for smaller obstacles and leading to lesser irate clients.
• Becoming more confident: Teams are able to with time become confident in handling clients and tend to take up more responsibilities out of sheer eagerness.
• Upselling to clients: Teams are able to upsell to existing clients and help other team members in dealing effectively with clients.

Is your team persistent and gritty?

At the end of the day, the goal that your team is chasing is to meet the target win rate which can only be done if they close maximum sales. The sales cycle can sometimes reach the turning point and collapse. In the face of that, a team needs to remain focused and have a positive outlook. While most people would agree that Resilience is a power skill that plays a big role here, we’ve narrowed down two very critical skills that help close the loop: Result Orientation and Optimism.

Result Orientation is the strong drive towards target achievement. It is the ability to purposefully create and accomplish goals while also prioritizing, raising achievability standards and working within timeframes.

This power skill is largely underrated and taken for granted especially in sales. Therefore, it is a skill that most teams do not fully develop. This skill allows the team to keep their eyes on the end goal i.e. target achievement with laser sharp focus while ensuring top quality delivery of work. This is easier said than done as it involves a lot of underlying internal factors within an organization which can potentially become a big roadblock in sales.

• Eliminating sore points: Teams are able to take on heavy targets without complaining and redirect energies into whatever needs to be done to achieve their goal.
• Setting personal targets: Teams are able to set personal targets that contribute to the larger goal which helps enhance productivity.
• Influencing the team positively: Teams are able to build smooth internal processes, positively influence and help others by being more productive.
• Increasing clients: Teams are able to look beyond, nurture all leads and book quality appointments so they have more chances of repeated clients and reduced irate clients.

Optimism is the ability to maintain a positive outlook and operate with persistence even in the midst of adversity or suffering from setbacks.

The bitter truth about sales is that despite having done things right, you might face rejection. This power skills allows teams to not give up in the face of rejection and stay hopeful of things working out. It is the last-mile effort that can lead to fulfilling results. The final stage of the sales cycle is where most people give up. Optimism can help your teams give that final push which lands you a win.

• Treating each lead as a customer: Teams are able to consider each lead as a potential sale which means they put in their 100 per cent every step of the way despite pushback.
• Seeing objections as opportunities: Teams are able to gain crucial insights from objections that help them innovate and come up with more powerful strategies.
• Keeping the client engaged: Teams are able to not drop the ball at any point by keeping in touch with the client even if it is through small talk or continuous follow-ups.
• Removing any roadblocks: Teams are able to make all possible escalations to potentially eliminate concerns and ensure a smooth client experience.

Improving your win rate requires an approach that is embedded in an organization’s system. Power skills play a huge role in maximizing team performance and this impacts business metrics dramatically. Investing deeply in upskilling teams on specific power skills to solve for critical metrics is an obvious way forward for ambitious organizations who want to build long term solutions to business problems.

To take actionable steps to improve your win rate, visit Fundamento.

The last two years have seen workplace trends that have lasted longer than what most people had anticipated. A lot of factors led to a change in perceptions and behaviors at work — generational diversity, remote working, talent versus opportunities imbalance and a lot more. However, one of the most prominent trends that’s stayed and taken different forms is the “Great Resignation”, or in simpler words, attrition.

Companies have struggled and continue to do so with retaining employees. The pandemic changed the way we work and now that we’re stepping out of the pandemic, a lot of companies have failed to realize that things aren’t going to go back to what they were before. Not only the way we work changed but the way people associate themselves to work changed. The pandemic led to a wave of layoffs and salary cuts which employers are now looking to deeply compensate in the new world of work. However, this has changed the game in two very significant ways — one, there are more opportunities out there for employees which makes them dominate the market and compensations are higher than ever before which makes retention tougher, two, employees no longer only care about compensation, they want a company to invest in their growth while building a culture that facilitates this.

Attrition is a result of an imbalance between what employees want and what employers think they need.

It is true that the pandemic led companies to be more empathetic towards their employees, like never before. Most organizations have in fact taken major steps towards accelerating growth journeys of employees and investing in their development. However, according to recent research, the top reason for employees leaving a company continues to be professional development.

Read more about how learning and development can enhance productivity at work and in turn impact a company’s bottom line.

Learning and growth is directly linked to lower attrition

There are enough and more statistics out there that show learning and growth opportunities as the number one motivator for employees. LinkedIn’s recent research reflected this and a quick poll Fundamento conducted online substantiated the claim that learning opportunities drive people to work better.

A Gallup study conducted on behalf of Amazon showed that 71% of people felt that their job satisfaction was higher with training and development. It has also come out to be the top reason for why people don’t want to switch jobs and skills training has emerged as one of the main perks younger workers look for in a new job.

Upskilling is a two-way street in which employers need to participate

There’s been a huge uptake in people enrolling for courses, going above and beyond to educate themselves on newer subjects and consistently upskill themselves to stay relevant in the job market. However, not everyone is okay with doing this in silos. People want employers to be actively involved in this process of upskilling.

In fact, being involved in an employee’s training and development process also allows companies to tap red flags sooner than later. A detailed write-up by Reworked highlighted how if people in a team are more interested in topics like conflict resolution, it could be a sign that there’s discontentment within the team. Therefore, it is crucial that companies not only create a learning environment for their employees, but also actively invest in it and give them the push they need to upskill in areas that might otherwise become reasons for them leaving the company.

The fact of the matter is that attrition as a problem is not new, but if there’s a way to beat it today, companies have to make their employees feel nurtured. The future of work demands learning and growth to become a vital part of a company’s ecosystem in order to develop teams that outperform targets and achieve high performance.

For more on how you can do this efficiently, on the back of data, check out Fundamento.

Investing in your people means your people stay.

In a world where Gen Z is redefining workplace culture, there’s higher attrition than ever before. The latest buzzword “quiet quitting” has sparked a massive debate over culture, L&D and taking initiative at the workplace. Under these circumstances, the above statement holds more true than ever. Let’s dig a bit deeper.

For long, creating growth opportunities for employees was seen as a good-to-have, but not a necessity. There’s ample evidence today that learning and development contributes to business outcomes. One of the metrics by which this is measured is attrition. Lower attrition equals more productivity which results in better output and so on. Attrition is a metric that can largely be controlled through targeted investment in people.

Reports put opportunities to learn and grow as the number one driver of a great work culture. This is primarily due to the lack of growth and upskilling opportunities provided to people by their employers. Unfortunately, the onus of upskilling oneself is limited to one’s own investment in themselves. This is reflected in supporting studies that show around 54% of people feel they lack the power skills required to survive the future of work or the “new normal”. Therefore, today’s workforce is more likely to be satisfied in a workplace that invests in their growth. A Better Buys report showed that 92% of employees think having access to professional development is very important or important.

Providing increased learning opportunities to people so that they upskill can help instil a sense of purpose in team members which means they would be more productive and less likely to switch jobs, hence contributing to business success. While quiet quitting as a concept is much under debate, the overarching sentiment lies in an employee losing initiative and the will to go the extra mile. It is usually a result of employees lacking a sense of purpose. Introducing learning initiatives that allow employees to chart out their own growth trajectory, gives them the fuel they need to propel not only their own professional development but the company as a whole.

It was probably in 2020 that for the first time people started paying attention to the reality that was about to hit most organizations — one where many job roles would become insignificant, therefore completely dissolved in the advent of technology and digitally transformed working mechanisms. This was probably accelerated by the pandemic because for the first time people saw a glimpse of what technology brings to the table. However, what many thought was a result of the pandemic was actually hiding in the shadows long before that. The Future of Jobs Report 2020 estimated that by 2025, “85 million jobs might be displaced by a shift in the division of labor between humans and machines.”

This is a reality that people found hard to digest but its roots have spread far and wide in the last two years. Forward thinking organizations have since shifted their focus deeply on building efficient teams and people affected by this trend have started focussing on remaining more relevant by upskilling rigorously. The surge in upskilling and demand for learning and development by employees doesn’t come as a surprise in that case.

L&D pros now have a seat on the table

In order to build organizations of the future, one can not today run away from transformation in business. This means taking the time to invest in talent that can work with agility, growing and learning in the flow of work. The needle has shifted significantly in this direction. The biggest trend that’s emerged amidst this is that L&D pros have seen a hockey stick growth in their careers. They are currently “in demand”. Just within 2021 and 2022, there’s been a 94% increase in demand for L&D professionals. This indicates a huge shift. In fact, research shows that over 90% of business leaders report that they expect employees to pick up new skills on the job.

L&D pros are today a big part of strategic business discussions because how they equip the workforce with capabilities needed for the future of work, essentially ever-changing and unpredictable, is critical to the pace at which the company grows. However, another thing that’s emerged as a result of this is that while L&D has become front and center, how it is rolled out is not entirely in sync globally.

This makes the role of L&D pros even more critical

The window of reskilling has become shorter over the years which means the pace at which an organization changes has increased rapidly. Therefore, in order to build teams that are “transformation-ready”, there needs to be effective upskilling solutions put in place by leaders who can envision the future and are able to equip the organization with the right tools to execute strategies and L&D plans in a way that’s effective. Learning and development directly impacts business — this has come out in different kinds of research done over the years and is something we’ve spoken about at length through previous articles. However, this impact can only happen if L&D interventions are targeted and there is measurable RoI on training at the end of this effort.

Data-driven training is key and Fundamento equips organizations with actionable data on behavioral skills that are critical to the future of work, provides training recommendations on the back of that data and helps them regularly measure RoI on training so they can close the loop and see their efforts play out in the most productive manner.

As we move forward, the role of L&D leaders is going to become more and more critical to how an organization adapts to the changing world of work and will dictate the pace at which the organization grows.

Today, L&D leaders are more in demand than ever before. Of course, a lot of that is due to so much talk around upskilling that it’s become a buzzword in employer branding and talent sourcing. It’s often the first selling point of an organization nowadays that’s also catering to the increasing demands for learning opportunities laid out by employees. This has directly led to increased relevance of L&D leaders and departments in organizations. Most organizations earlier doubled the HR function with L&D as a subset. However, today, there are separate L&D departments in each organization with leaders who deeply specialize in developing talent.

Before we deep-dive into this, let’s leave you with some statistics that were recently published by LinkedIn on the increasing demand for L&D leaders:

• 15% more promotions of L&D pros this year
• 64% L&D pros saw their organization’s culture of learning grow stronger in the past year
• 79% of L&D pros agree: it’s less expensive to reskill a current employee than to hire a new one

There has been a shift in the market and one that’s becoming increasingly prominent. From being a supporting function, L&D as a whole, but more importantly L&D roles are now at the core of what organizations are investing in for growth. The biggest change with regards to this has come in the form of top management giving L&D pros a seat on the table. The realization that’s now set in is that L&D leadership is critical in developing organizational growth strategies — this circles back to how learning is directly linked to business success.

Read more about this below:

Building a learning organization requires more than just an L&D budget

We deep-dive this week into some of the best practices for organizations to implement effective and impactful…

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Head to www.fundamento.ai to know more about how you can transform your business with data-backed upskilling solutions.